The Debian Project is proud to announce that the backports service,previously available at www.backports.org is now an official Debianservice and will be available from backports.debian.org

Backports are packages from the testing distribution recompiled for thecurrent stable (or even oldstable) to provide users of the stabledistribution with new versions of some packages, like the Linux kernel,the Iceweasel browser or the OpenOffice.org suite, without sacrificingthe general stability of the system.

The archive currently has packages backported for the Lenny distribution(how many?), but the infrastructure to accept packages for the upcomingSqueeze release is already in place, to allow Debian Installer images toconfigure the backports repository by default without generating errorson user systems. The service for Squeeze will be enabled at a laterdate, after the release.

Because of some limitations in the Debian Bug Tracking System, any bugsrelevant to backported packages still have to be reported to thedebian-backports list, which will now also move on lists.debian.org.

Could you provide the source of the announcement? I spent various minutes searching for it in the Debian's list but I had no luck.I believe that new GNU/Linux users should use Stable because the development branches require administrative knowledge. Then comes Backports, which provides updates to packages which might not justify using a different branch by themselves but which are crucial to everyday users, like web browsers, instant messengers and music players. I've always used Testing but I am very happy that Backports is now an official service.